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Images of Time: Paradigms of Memory and the
Collapse of the Novel of Contemporary History in
Spain (2000–2010)
Ulrich Winter
Critics have long considered the Spanish “novel of memory” (Herzberger) of
the last thirty years primarily in its political, ideological, ethical, and
psychosocial dimensions: as a kind of complementary historical writing that
belatedly grants the losers of the Civil War the recognition denied to them
by the writings of Francoist history. As justified as this may be, this
dimension acts as a kind of magnetic field, diverting attention from other
aspects, some of which are quite prominent since they are inherent in the
logic of memory. This is the case, for example, with the issue of time, to
which the present essay is devoted.1 Psychosocial approaches to the novel as
well as interpretations centered on power relations focus on the political
instrumentalization of memory. However, they take as their starting point an
unchanging, static, often dichotomous notion of memory (e.g., the memory
of the victors versus that of the losers, the remembered events and trauma,
etc.). By contrast, the question of the temporality of memory makes it
possible to recognize a change in the notion of memory itself that has taken
place since the 1930s and 1940s. This change sheds light on the internal
logic of the Civil War novel’s development from the neorealism of the
postwar period to postmodernism and finally to the cosmopolitanization of
memory (and literature) in the 2000s. It then becomes clear that the change
undergone by the notion of memory in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries—especially between 1980 and 2010—is also connected to the
different epistemological premises in which it participates. The question of
the political dimension of the novel of memory can then be raised anew from
this discursive historical perspective.
In this essay, I focus primarily on the change in the temporal structure of
Memory and Its Discontents: Spanish Culture in the Early
Twenty-First Century
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13 ♦ IMAGES OF TIME
novels of the last ten years, considering the causes and consequences of that
change, and formulating some of the political questions it raises. My first
thesis is that depictions of the Civil War in Spanish novels of the early
twenty-first century stand within a fundamentally different horizon of
inquiry from novels of memory of the 1980s and 1990s, which are
associated with the “recuperación de la memoria histórica” (recuperation of
historical memory), and the novels of the 1950s. There is no question that
the arrival of a new generation is the determining factor in this change. And
yet this sociohistorical explanation neglects important aspects of culture and
history. To begin, I will sketch the change in the discourse of memory up to
2000 by showing how embedded it is in other cultural, aesthetic,
philosophical, and also political processes. My second argument is that since
2000 the change in the discourse of memory has been associated with the
emergence of a new structure of temporality. Until this point, a narrative
logic had been decisive for the literary staging of memory, which implied a
linear concept of history and hence a traditional notion of memory. Now,
however, the relationship between the novel (narrativity) and memory
appears to break down. The fact that the flood of Civil War novels has
continued uninterrupted until today only seems to contradict this diagnosis.
The new temporal structure of staged memory is increasingly based on a
logic of the image. I will explore this new logic primarily by looking at a
single text: Les veus del Pamano (2004) by Jaume Cabré, which I will then,
by way of conclusion, compare to Anatomía de un instante (2009) by Javier
Cercas.
Contexts of the Narrative Discourse of Memory:
Postmodernization, Decontextualization, Cosmopolitanization,
and Ontologizing
As in other transitional states that made the move to democracy thirty to
forty years ago, in Spain the discourse of memory was initially at odds or
asynchronous with the now omnipresent paradigm of “cosmopolitan
memory” (Levy and Sznaider). The latter emerged in the late 1950s with the
Holocaust debate and began to take hold globally in the 1980s. This
asynchronicity was the case for literature as well as society. The first Civil
War novels to enjoy success in the Spanish market in the mid-1980s and to
achieve exemplary status—for example, El pianista (1985) by Manuel
Vázquez Montalbán or Beatus Ille (1986) by Antonio Muñoz Molina—were
not yet cosmopolitan in their approach; the “recuperación de la memoria
histórica” began by coming to terms with national history. Clear indicators
of a cosmopolitan interpretation of twentieth-century Spanish history began
to appear at the turn of the millennium.
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In this analysis I look first at the political and social arena, since this is
where cosmopolitanization takes place, analogous to the literary field. The
Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH)
(Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory), for example,
operates globally in that it no longer attempts to defend the interests of the
victims of Francoist repression (exclusively) within Spanish institutions, but
also within supranational ones like the United Nations (Gálvez Biesca). This
is also the moment when “memoria histórica” (historical memory) became a
broad and encompassing social discourse in Spain. In this respect, the year
2000 was a kind of turning point. It was then, at the very latest, that the
creeping cosmopolitan recoding of the Civil War began. That recoding made
it possible to continue the discourse of memory beyond the moment when
the needs of the immediate victims of historical justice and symbolic or
intellectual compensation were satisfied or else partially or completely taken
over by other social subsystems (political institutions, the courts). The
arrival of a new generation also did its part to ensure that the struggle for
recognition would take new forms. Increasingly, what is now at stake is the
need for meaning that the third postwar generation projects on the war. All
this applies to the literary and cultural field as well.2 Cosmopolitanization
became visible at about the same time in literature and film. Its hallmark is
the decontextualization of the depiction of the Civil War, its detachment
from its historical, ideological, and political contexts, which is not
infrequently accompanied by a tendency to stage historical conflicts as
Manichaean, mythical power constellations and emotional worlds of good
and evil, love and violence. Additionally, historical situations are expanded
to global dimensions: in Javier Cercas’s novel Soldados de Salamina (2001),
a nameless militiaman saves “the entire human race” by forgiving his
enemy. Above all the Hollywood-style feature film, by highlighting
atrocities of the Civil War and Franco’s fascism, made Spanish contributions
to the theme park of the “global icons” (Assmann and Conrad 1–16) of posttotalitarian memory. However, this insight is obscured by the fact that
historical constellations like “Left” and “Right,” “guerrilla resistance” and
“state terrorism,” “now” and “then” remain constant reference points.
Cosmopolitanization goes hand in hand with another recoding of
memory, which may be termed the ontologizing of memory. As Pierre Nora
already observed many years ago, we live today in “l’ère de la
commémoration” (“L’ère” 997) (the era of commemoration). The memory
of the human catastrophes of the twentieth century—two world wars,
genocide, ethnic and political cleansing—becomes omnipresent at the
moment when the last eyewitnesses die and communities of memory
(“milieux de mémoire”) become sites of memory (“lieux de mémoire” [Nora
“Between” 7]). But the “era of commemoration” also means that
remembering is more than an occasional culture of commemoration. The
recollection of past events has become a new cultural paradigm. As a mode
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of perception and reflection, indeed as an epistemological model, memory
might almost be compared to the centrality of consciousness and language in
the early twentieth century or that of intertextuality in the 1970s. The
paradigm of memory is based on the conviction that the past is the form in
which reality and representation—which are regarded as one and the same—
become observable. The view that reality itself may only become accessible
to observation and representation in the form of the no-longer-present, so
that memory becomes the normal case of perception, representation, and
mimesis . . . this insight is not new. As an axiom of postmodern philosophy,
however, it establishes the power of the paradigm of memory. Memory,
conversely, then becomes the discursive space for the all-pervasive
experience of inconsistent time or of the simultaneous presence of multiple
times or “ghostly presences,” as in Derrida’s notion of the “noncontemporaneity with itself of the living present” (Derrida xviii).
In this sense, it is no accident that the era of memory begins in the
1980s, the age of postmodernism. Precisely in this period, the omnipresence
of media representations of the past corresponds to the characteristic
postmodern attitude toward the life of an “aestheticized Lebenswelt”
(Welsch). The disappearance of the real or “hallucination ‘esthétique’ de la
réalité” (Baudrillard 114) (‘aesthetic’ hallucination of reality) and that of the
past are two facets of the same perception. In this respect, the always merely
represented presence of the past in the “era of memory” is the paradigm for
the always merely represented presence of the real; both are ontological and
epistemological obsessions of postmodernism. For the “novel of memory” of
this period, the dominant textual strategy is the so-called “historiographic
metafiction” (Hutcheon). The premises of postmodernism—radical
constructivism, pluralism of perspectives, the fundamental questioning of
reality’s knowability—are here applied to memory and the past. Hence it
seems almost inevitable that even typical novels of memory of the 1980s
like the above-mentioned Beatus Ille or El Pianista should develop a special
sensitivity to the historical world’s disappearance. Their attitudes toward the
politics of memory, however, are variable: while Muñoz Molina uses
narrative strategies of historiographic metafiction to promote historical
skepticism, a kind of “negative ontology of the past” (Ricœur, Temps 264),
Vázquez-Montalbán employs nearly identical strategies to champion a
reinstatement of memory. Despite their divergent positions—historical
skepticism versus reappropriation of history—both novels share the
premises of historiographic metafiction; for both, the defining pathos of time
is the disappearance of the past. In this respect among others, they differ
from the novels of memory of the previous and following decades.
Additionally, it need hardly be mentioned that in Spain the issue of the
presence and absence of memory has its parallel in the polemic surrounding
the “pacto de silencio” (pact of silence) as a prerequisite for the democratic
Transición (Transition).
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At the turn of the millennium, the panorama shifts once again: the
recollection of the past assumes a new ontological status in literature and
film. If in the 1980s and 1990s historical memory was primarily an act of
representation—or of consciousness-raising in the sense of the political
“recuperación de la memoria” (recuperation of memory)—in the 2000s it is
increasingly seen as an act that creates realities. This performative shift in
the discourse of memory may be regarded as part of a larger, more
comprehensive process of the ontologizing of memory. It too has a
significant parallel in the social and political arena. With the Ley de
Memoria Histórica (Law of Historical Memory) of 2004 (as unsatisfying as
that law may be [Moreno]), memory acquires a legal status: policy and law
grant the past a (however questionable) “right of residence” in present-day
reality; they declare it to be reality’s legally enforceable component. In
contrast to the 1980s and 1990s, it is no longer merely part of the imaginary
or symbolic; it is part of reality itself.3 This process too has parallels in
literature and film. Both genres now experiment with techniques of
nonfictional novels or “docufiction” (von Tschilschke and Schmelzer). The
question is no longer the disappearance of the past; rather, the aim is now to
authenticate the narrative, the fiction, by reference to the established
historical record and to make the two coincide. According to this paradigm,
novels are more authentic the more closely they resemble historical writing.
This is why Javier Cercas constructs his 2001 novel Soldados de Salamina
as a “relato real” (real story) and in 2009 writes Anatomía de instante as a
virtual history book.
The ontologizing and cosmopolitanization of memory go hand in hand;
in a certain sense, they vouch for each other. Because of its origins in the
Holocaust, the cosmopolitanization of memory enjoys the prestige of an
ethically and politically unassailable discourse. This fits well with the
political needs for meaning addressed to the Spanish Civil War novel. On
the one hand, the cosmopolitan paradigm continues to guarantee the
historical-political reference to the Civil War and Francoism in the national
context. On the other hand, there is a kind of “genetic alteration” of Civil
War depictions by cosmopolitan codes. The political character of the novel
of memory in the sense of the “recuperación de la memoria silenciada”
(recuperation of silenced memory) is not abolished; it remains present in
latent form. But it is no longer the only or the dominant way of interpreting
these novels. Soldados de Salamina may be read as a Civil War novel but
also as a reflection on the values of humanity, a subject that was introduced
above all by concentration camp literature and cosmopolitan discourse.
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Recent Novels of Memory: From Narrativity to Image
If this is indeed how things stand, then Civil War novels of the 1980s
occupy a completely different discursive context from those of the last ten to
fifteen years, the period of ontologizing and cosmopolitanization. This
change can be explained by the increasing distance from the Civil War, the
arrival of a new generation, and the general globalization of memory, but
how is it to be described? The point is that the concept of memory itself has
changed and this transformation can be seen in the specific temporal
structure of the novel’s recollection of the past. The central paradigm shift
between the 1980s/1990s and the 2000s, on which I focus in this essay,
involves the transition from a narrative logic to a logic of the image. The
term “image” is used here to evoke two different memory-related contexts.
As an epistemological paradigm, “image” refers to the increasing
plausibility in contemporary theory of a knowledge of the past that is
visually or imagistically organized.4 From a cultural-historical perspective, it
no doubt has one of its sources in the phenomenological radicalization of the
ancient notion of “la constitution iconique de la mémoire elle-même”
(Ricœur, La mémoire 339) (the iconic constitution of memory itself) or “le
devenir-image du souvenir” (Ricœur, La mémoire 7) (the becoming-image
of memory). It is no accident that recent years have seen the publication of
novels that organize memory iconically and imagistically in this sense. As a
narrative paradigm, “image” points to the tendency to eliminate chronology
and narrativity in favor of a simultaneity of times, a perception for which, as
noted above, the discourse of memory makes a discursive framework
available.5
The years between 1985 and 1996 were a period of clear politicization
of the discourse of memory. The specifically political element of this period
consists of the “recuperación” (recuperation) of suppressed history. Novels
like El Pianista do not just set out to tell stories; they are above all intent on
making those stories heard. This political gesture of “recuperation” is a
fundamentally narrative one. Not because the object of memory itself is
necessarily narrative in nature, but because literature in particular shoulders
the task of recalling even non-narrative realities of totalitarian pasts: moods,
atmospheres, and the private and collective unconscious. The internal
affinity between history (and myth), the memory which reclaims that
history, and narrative genres (novel, film) are rooted in the intrinsic
connection between the novel’s narrativity and the temporal directionality of
the rehabilitating act of memory. Remembering itself as a gesture of
recollection is structurally linear and narrative, in the sense that it consists in
transplanting past events to their own future and fitting them into that future.
This may be precisely one of the reasons why novels and feature films were
so successful in the “political” phase of the discourse of memory, from 1985
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to 2000. In the 2000s—as I will now attempt to show—the relationship
between memory and the novel begins to change: the temporality of linearity
collapses; past and present are no longer held together by a narrative logic;
the organizational principle of narrativity is increasingly replaced by that of
the image. As unlikely as it may seem, memory and the novel drift apart.
This raises the question of where the political is situated in the 2000s, of
what is its structural foundation, and where is it more than the mere citation
of an ideological bias in favor of the losers of the Civil War. In what
follows, I will explore this fundamental thesis by examining two
complementary and controversial models from the most recent novels of
memory: Les veus del Pamano by Jaume Cabré and Anatomía de un instante
by Javier Cercas.
Les veus del Pamano (2004)
In Les veus del Pamano, Jaume Cabré tells a story set in a little village in the
Vall d’Àssua in the Pyrenees, where the village schoolteacher and painter
Oriol Fontelles falls into the hands of the Falangists in the early 1940s and
finds himself attracted to the seductive, rich, and powerful Elisenda Vilabrú,
who falls in love with him. When he stands by and does nothing to prevent
the murder of the village boy Joanet, whose parents are Republicans, Oriol’s
pregnant wife leaves him. He then writes a confessional diary for his unborn
daughter and secretly joins the resistance fighters, until his double life leads
to his downfall on the very day in 1944 on which the maquis plan to invade
Spain through the Vall d’Arán. Elisenda realizes Oriol’s betrayal, but she
arranges for her lover to enter the history of the village as a Falangist martyr.
Half a century after Oriol’s execution, the village schoolteacher Tina Bros
happens upon the diary while doing research for an exhibition project in the
dilapidated school building and discovers Oriol’s true identity. At this point,
Elisenda, who is now very old and doing everything she can to have him
beatified, has Tina murdered.
The interesting temporal and memory-related strategies of this novel are
connected with what might be called its cinematic aesthetic. In itself, the fact
that Cabré has clearly designed Les veus del Pamano to be “a feature film in
the guise of a novel” is not surprising.6 After all, this is an author with
extensive screenwriting experience, and this is a novel that was produced
and broadcast in 2009 as a two-part miniserie (mini-series) by the Catalan
television station TV3.7 There is no doubt that it is a telegenic novel; indeed,
it would not be surprising if the mental images formed by some of its readers
as they read the novel were television-quality. But I will not attempt to
document that filmic aesthetic here. To do so would only confirm the
obvious and reduce the novel to this transmedial dimension while losing
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sight of the key point. Rather, this convertibility is itself a symptom of the
paradigm of memory in question and its temporal strategies. Only from this
perspective does it then become possible to appreciate Cabré’s narrative art,
which consists in claiming new territory for literary realism by using
specifically novelistic means to produce a cinematic effect. The television
production (which is relatively conventional and, avoiding risk, does little
beyond expertly converting the material to the miniseries format) departs
from the novel in precisely the respects that most embody Cabré’s
techniques of literary visualization and at the same time configure his notion
of memory (this alone shows how differently novels and television series
operate as media) via the relationship between Oriol and Tina. While the
novel takes great pains and employs a wide range of parallelisms and
assimilations to establish this relationship as a spiritual kinship between two
village schoolteachers that triumphs over time, the television series reduces
the present-day plot to an inconsequential framing device.8 The crux of our
question is how Cabré articulates the connection between past and present in
this relationship. What is the resulting image of time and temporality? What
does this mean for the notion of memory, and what are its consequences for
the politicization of memory?
Narrativity
I begin with the plot, undoubtedly the level on which the novel is least
original. The obstacles, figures, settings, and times in the two contrasted
temporal stages, the 1940s and the 2000s, create the impression of complex
contemporary history. To conclude, however, from the plot-centered
character of the novel and the close connection between the historical hero
Oriol and his posthumous champion Tina, that the links between the present
and history are primarily narrative would be a mistake. In fact—
paradoxically—the level of the plot is actually relatively unimportant to the
temporality of the novel. For as complex as the image of contemporary
history is in the interweaving of the characters in the just under seven
hundred pages of the novel, in the end there are virtually no ambiguities or
indeterminacies. True, Oriol and Tina stand before the wreckage of their
private happiness: he has betrayed his wife morally and ideologically, while
she is being betrayed by her husband; he never meets his only child, while
her only child is entering a monastery, etc. Yet, they are heroes of private
life. Their options are always morally unambiguous, and in the end they
always choose the good. Even more unambiguous and hence less dynamic
are the elemental goals that the other characters pursue, with more or less
success but always single-mindedly, in Cabré’s thoroughly melodramatic
world, where the ruling forces quest for power, as well as thirst for
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vengeance and sex. There is hardly an event that is not determined by one of
these force fields. They generate mysteries and tensions but not openness,
indeterminacy, or polyvalence of meanings. This is true for both plots, the
present as well as the past. In this respect, in Cabré’s novel the 1940s are not
fundamentally different from the 2000s.
If the plot structure of Les veus del Pamano is schematic, the novel also,
paradoxically, does relatively little to give narrative shape to the relationship
between past and present. Tina never evinces an existential, much less a
truly political interest in the past. Cabré presents his heroine (and he is a
master at this) as wholly absorbed in the pragmatic, unspectacular everyday
world of our present day, which is a plausible one for his readers. It is the
Lebenswelt of the private, whose coordinates Anthony Giddens once
described as “life politics.” As Giddens explains, “life politics . . . are about
how we should live in a world where everything that used to be natural (or
traditional) now has in some sense to be chosen, or decided about” (Beyond
91) and where “globalizing tendencies intrude deeply into the reflexive
project of the self” (Modernity 214). In this “post-traditional” (Beyond 5)
world of “manufactured uncertainty” (Beyond 7), everyday life becomes a
“universe of high reflexivity” (Beyond 7). Consequently, the process of
coming to terms with the past takes place “beyond Left and Right” (Giddens
Beyond), beyond collective identities and political antagonisms. These are
the coordinates from which Tina’s turn to the past comes about. Hence it is
no accident that Tina stumbles on Oriol’s confession unintentionally and
precisely in the context of a project for the village school. There are many
subsequent parallels between the two heroes. Their lives are so closely
intertwined that, in the end, Tina could be his letter’s intended recipient,
chosen by fate to be Oriol’s adoptive daughter.9 But none of this can alter
the fact that the motivation for her turn to history is private and remains so to
the end—despite half-hearted protestations to the contrary by the narrator or
herself. That there might be a deeper meaning to Oriol’s destiny or even a
political duty to uncover his true story is a possibility that only surfaces
occasionally and remains ambiguous, incidental; it is not the dominant
attitude toward the past. Can one still speak here of “recuperación de la
memoria histórica” (recuperation of historical memory) where there is
neither a character who remembers nor one who fully identifies with the role
of secondary witness?
This superficially historical—but on closer inspection unhistorical—
relationship to the past would have been deemed “unpolitical” during the
1950s to 1980s. Here, the connection of past and present was existential. The
protagonists of the novels of the last thirty years increasingly lose that
existential connection as the war disappears from the biographical horizon of
authors and readers. For the young people in Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio’s El
Jarama (1955), it is painful that the war as a part of their lives has been
denied, while novels of the early 1980s (such as José María Guelbenzu’s El
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río de la luna [1981]) show just how existentially and traumatically it is
interwoven with those lives. In Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s El Pianista,
there is still at least, in the figure of Alberto, a communicative connection
between the war generation and the group of friends who hear him play in a
bar in the 1980s. In Antonio Muñoz Molina’s El jinete polaco (1991), it is
only a chest with photographs that mediates between the generations. In
Manuel Rivas’s El lápiz del carpintero (1998) and Javier Cercas’s Soldados
de Salamina, we see a contemporary of the readers who is historically
uninterested at first but then becomes capable of enthusiasm (the reporter
Sousa in the first novel and the character of Cercas in the second); both at
least still meet the protagonists of the Civil War era. The price that must be
paid to make these characters’ sudden interest in a history from which they
have long since felt removed (because they are wrapped up in “life politics”)
seem plausible is steep. In Cercas’s nonfictional novel, it has to be the
authentic historical heroes, the “amigos del bosque,” whom the novel’s main
character meets.
To a large extent, the Civil War novel’s poetics of memory may be seen
as a reflection of the gradual dissolving of the communicative connection
between primary and secondary witnesses. Cabré goes half a step further:
overall, he is still more systematic and perhaps even more honest in showing
the irreversible rift that the dying out of the eyewitness generation has left
behind in communicative memory since the 1990s. True, Cabré does not
dissolve the narrative connection between past and present completely; but
the many stories, great and small, recounted in Les veus del Pamano no
longer motivate the present’s interest in history. In other words, although it
is a plot-heavy novel, the narrative logic is no longer the link between past
and present. For Cabré, the loss of this connection is overcompensated in
typical fashion, in the novel’s melodramatic logic: Tina is murdered by a
force that rises up from the past and strikes at her directly—the henchmen of
the aged Elisenda.
There is a tear in the fabric of generational continuity that cannot be
repaired. For Cabré, the linearity of the temporal sequence of past and
present is thinned out to the vanishing point. If it disappears completely in
the structure of the novel, the politics of the complementary, compensatory
narration of the true story—the “recuperación” (recuperation)—also loses its
meaning. What penetrates this vacuous connection between past and present
that is no longer existentially motivated by direct experience or direct
political commitment, yet, nonetheless, fulfills the continuing need for
narrative sense-making? In Les veus del Pamano, if we remain at the level of
the narrative, the driving force animating the mutual interest of past and
present—Oriol and Tina—is a mysterious, mythical, almost animistic force
of attraction that proceeds from the reading of the diary, connects the two
temporal stages, and turns Tina into Oriol’s adoptive daughter.
Communicative memory has all but ceased to be a shared space that would
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enable the two to meet. If we leave the level of the narrative, however, we
see that the gap or blank left behind by the loss of narrativity within the
connection between the eras is occupied by a diegetic gesture: a
spatiotemporal and/or cognitive leap. This gesture isolates the constitutive
categories of plot and narrativity—time, space, and subject—and
reconfigures them according to another logic, which is not that of narrative
but that of the image. In fact, Cabré connects the temporal levels of past and
present less through narrative techniques in the strict sense than through (in
the broader sense) stylistic ones. Here the novel is especially original, and
the strategy of iconization extremely subtle.
Linguistic Gestures
Cabré works with a stylistic technique that one might describe as linguistic
gestuality. One example of a linguistic gesture of this kind is the
introduction of the provincial governor Prats: “L’Excelentísimo Señor Don
Nazario Prats, calb, bigoti, retallat, gotes de suor al front i sota la samarreta,
i a més, Gobernador Civil y Jefe Provincial del Movimiento, estava
neguitós” (Cabré 37) (His Excellency Don Nazario Prats, Civil Governor
and Provincial Head of the Movement, was bald, mustachioed, rather short,
sweaty in his forehead and under his undershirt, and nervous). The use of the
complete title is a citation of the official discourse, which is then
immediately—in a gesture typical of the novel—first ironically undermined
(was bald, mustachioed, sweaty, and nervous) and then commented on from
the character’s perspective: “Davant de la senyora Elisenda o estàs neguitós
o no ets humá” (Cabré 37) (Who isn’t nervous when facing Senyora
Elisenda?). The reason I describe these techniques as linguistic gestuality
rather than as dialogical narration (official versus unofficial or private
discourse) is to emphasize the interplay of symbolic and performative sensemaking strategies. These are central to the novel’s temporal strategies and
cinematic realism. In this novel, linguistic gestures work like performative
roles: in addition to the denotative meaning of a statement and its
connotations (Prats’s title and name stand for the official discourse; set
against this official appearance is the divergent perception of his body and
his private discourse), there is also another meaning, which the statement
produces as a “speech act” (Searle, Austin). This meaning has less to do with
the fact that there are two truths about Prats (he is a Falange officer and also
a human being); rather, it consists of the oscillation between these two
truths. Thus, the sentence quoted above (like many sentences in the novel)
has two unformulated subtexts, a connotative and a performative one. The
connotative one says: the world of the Falange is schizophrenic,
hypocritical, or superficial. The narrative gesture, however, lies at the
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performative level of the subtext, which says: public and private are two
unstable discursive states, between which there is a constant oscillation. This
gesture is more than irony. The reader constantly has an external as well as
an internal perspective. In other cases, this gestuality enables the novel to
switch among different speaking subjects or subjects of perception,
sometimes multiple times within a single syntagm.10
The fact that this “flickering” takes so many different forms and occurs
so frequently justifies us in regarding it as a systematic textual strategy. It
becomes especially interesting where it is not just interdiscursive,
intercognitive, and interpersonal (appearance and reality shift among
different characters’ perspectives), but interepochal, intertemporal. In fact,
transhistorical shifting between past and present is one of the novel’s most
heavily used techniques. From it we can derive a specific conception of
temporality that defines a view of memory. One example of this gestural
production of a montage of temporal stages is the introduction of the
character of Oriol and the depiction of his relationship to Tina. The two first
come into contact—here still completely traditionally, with no violation of
the temporal levels, as in the pre-realistic novel of the eighteenth century—
through the diary. Tina salvages it from the school building at the last
minute and begins to read it. After a few pages, she suddenly remembers
where she has seen the name Oriol before: “José Oriol Fontelles Grau, caído
por Dios y por la Patria” (Cabré 33) (José Oriol Fontelles Grau, he died a
hero’s death for God and Fatherland)—the epitaph on the gravestone at the
cemetery. The first abrupt switch between temporal levels occurs right
between the two scenes just cited: Tina’s reading of the diary and her
remembering of the epitaph. Here Cabré interpolates, without further
commentary, his first extended characterization of Oriol in the form of a
scene between he and his wife Rosa. This analepsis resembles a cinematic
montage in which the scene from the past immediately follows the present
scene that evokes it (diegetically motivated only by the cigar box in which
the diary was found): “[Tina] va tocar, amb cura, la capsa de puros amb la
seva mà enguantada. Què has dit?” (Cabré 30) (Tina ran her gloved hand
gently over the cigar box. What did you say?) [said Oriol to Rosa].
In and of themselves, these montage-like cuts are not unusual for the
modern novel. In Les veus del Pamano, they become increasingly bold as
the novel progresses and at the same time gradually more plausible. Cabré
succeeds in making subjects and eras flicker into view by turns, as if
consciousness and eras were electromagnetic states that can be activated and
deactivated. The gesture of the cut is not negative, deconstructive; it doesn’t
call our habits of perception and sense-making into question. On the
contrary, Cabré’s art is to present this to the reader as a further heightening
of realistic illusionism, not as something unsettling or avant-garde. How can
this effect be explained? There are two possibilities.
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The first possibility is that the leaps bring about a desubjectification of
the characters and a detemporalization of their life worlds; the two merge
into one. This transsubjective and transepochal consolidation is the actual
story of the novel, which is narrated in a perspectival manner. In the abovementioned narrative, parallels between the two characters (life situation,
death, etc.) contribute to it as well. Once this door has been opened, the
leaps become increasingly bold without ever exceeding the threshold of
immediate comprehensibility. Tina is brought into a generational
relationship with Oriol that is poorly motivated diegetically and primarily
suggested through perspective and becomes his actual addressee. As a result,
as she enters the collective rushing of Pamano’s history she brings her own
era and consciousness with her; the narrator is part of this amalgamation as
well.11
The second possibility is that once one has developed a sense for
gestural writing, it is hard to find passages in Les veus del Pamano that do
not fall into this category. Behind the narrated story, the entire novel
unfolds, as it were, a second time as a pantomime of performative gestures.
In a sense, this almost continuous theatricalization of the level of discours
corresponds to the melodrama on the level of histoire, which is
unremittingly motivated by power, vengeance, and sex. Both are well-suited
to the aesthetic of a television miniseries. Here too, however, the gestural
level of discours is more interesting, for its plot is effectively the basis for
the screenplay of a possible film. The performative subtext of the gesture is
the interface of a cinematic adaptation. In gestuality, linguistically and
symbolically generated meaning and visually and cinematically generated
meaning coincide.
Images of Time
What image of time and the subject is produced by these gestures? Eras and
subjects are no longer connected narratively but spatialized and juxtaposed
simultaneously; they are effectively parallel worlds. Their contiguity is that
of the simultaneity of the objects in an image. Hence contemporary history
no longer appears in this novel as the recollection of things past but as the
imagining of a reality that differs from our present only in that it happened
once before. Cabré’s technique of “cross-fading” ultimately eliminates the
distinction between remembering and imagining, primary and secondary
witnessing, which is essential for the novel of memory—or else makes them
coincide as in a stereoscopic image. The linear temporality of past and
present collapses. The montage discussed above is a good example of this.
The scene between Oriol and his wife is presented after Tina has spent the
entire day reading the diary; is it a historical scene internal to the fiction or a
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25 ♦ IMAGES OF TIME
product of Tina’s historical imagination? The question remains undecided.
While in the 1980s the pathos and obsession of the novel of memory was the
disappearance of the present, the distinguishing feature of the contemporary
novel of memory is the lack of decisive distinction between imagining and
(imagined) remembering, or primary and secondary witnessing. Since there
are virtually no primary witnesses left, the category loses its original
meaning, so that the secondary witnesses (Tina) identify with the primary
ones (Oriol), who always appear as victims. Here too, Cabré goes a step
beyond Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina—or more precisely its film
adaptation by David Trueba. Whereas Lola relives Sánchez Mazas’s
execution by firing squad in her imagination and physically manifests his
fear and pain (which is also a leveling of primary and secondary witnessing),
in Les veus del Pamano Tina is killed.
One of my main theses was that the contemporary discourse of memory
is structured by the paradigm of the image. In Les veus del Pamano, that
paradigm operates on a number of different levels: in the proximity to a
television series, its gestural language, its visualizations, and finally as a
semantic structure that combines past and present and brings narrativity and
linearity to the point of collapse. To develop my thesis further and to
highlight the political implications of this development, I turn now to an
alternative model of the Spanish literature of memory which dissolves the
link between memory and the novel in a different way but one still based on
the paradigm of the image: Javier Cercas’s Anatomía de un instante. Since
this text works less with descriptive than with argumentative techniques, I
will limit myself to an analysis of its argument.
Javier Cercas: Anatomía de un instante (2009)
In a text that seems to vacillate between novel and history book, Javier
Cercas reconstructs the causes, course, and consequences of the military
putsch of February 23, 1981. His starting point is a specific moment of that
putsch—the moment when the army has occupied Parliament and is firing
warning shots into the air, and the deputies are taking cover under their
seats; only Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez remains sitting upright in his seat
on the left side of the front row, “como el capitán que permanece inmóvil en
el puente de mando mientras su barco se hunde” (Cercas Anatomía 429)
(like the captain who remains motionless on the bridge while his ship is
sinking):
La cámara propone un plano fijo y frontal [ . . . ] con la figura de Adolfo
Suárez en el centro casi exacto de la imagen, monopolizando la atención
del espectador como si en la sala [el hemiciclo del Congreso] se
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estuviera desarrollando un drama histórico y el presidente del gobierno
interpretara el papel principal. (Cercas Anatomía 331)
(The camera shows a fixed and frontal shot [ . . . ] with Adolfo Suárez’s
figure nearly exactly in the middle of the image, monopolizing the
attention of the spectator as if a historical drama were taking place in the
hemicycle of parliament and the president played the lead.)
Unlike Cabré, Cercas starts with a real image, a television image
showing Suárez at a decisive moment of the putsch. From a naturalistic
perspective, one could easily justify this selection of an image-like moment
by pointing out that for those not directly involved, the entire series of
events was at any rate only accessible in the form of the subsequent
television broadcast. For the secondary witnesses, the media depiction was
the final authority on its truth. A film adaptation of Cercas’s text—as absurd
as it would be—would not yield a television series as with Cabré but the
television recording of “23-F” itself. For Cercas, however, history also
crystallizes in images in a very different sense: in his view, Suárez’s
unflappable composure as he stands up to the violence of the military is the
expression, the “cifra exacta” (Cercas Anatomía 430) (exact key) of a
political iconography within which the entire history of the coup is
symbolically condensed.
In terms of his narrative approach, then, Cercas seems to pursue
precisely the opposite strategy of Cabré. Instead of detemporalizing the
historical worlds and arranging them side by side within the metonymic
logic of the image, Cercas recounts or renarrativizes something that
apparently is already an image: history. And history has become an image in
a twofold sense: in reality and in the media as a television still (which we see
on the book cover); and symbolically, because—as Cercas sees it—in the
actual existing image the historical constellation of the putsch is articulated,
together with its causes, its course, and its consequences: the “anatomy of a
moment.” What is actually a temporal process—the attempted putsch—
seems, in this image, to have congealed into a state of emblematic
simultaneity, a Gestalt. The book is the attempt to explain this true image,
the vera icon, to translate or dissolve it back into a narrative: “explorar el
significado de un gesto” (Cercas Anatomía 18) (to explore the meaning of a
gesture).
This, at least, is how Cercas presents it. But this image is not as true as it
seems or as Cercas would have us believe. And not just because it is a
television image (as Cercas himself concedes) but rather (a point he glosses
over) because—as I will show in a moment—its symbolic concision is
ultimately rooted in a literary interpretation of history that Cercas has
undertaken of the putsch. Thus, Cercas does not (just) renarrativize an image
that miraculously coincides with reality. Rather, he repeats
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27 ♦ IMAGES OF TIME
historiographically the foregoing literary interpretation of a historical event.
Cercas argues that Anatomía de un instante is a history book about a
novelistic reality. In fact, it is the opposite: a literary text about a historical
reality.
Cercas conceals this fact by thematizing the novel-reality dichotomy
himself, skillfully and quite elaborately. In various ways, he allows
Anatomía de un instante to hang suspended in the limbo between literature
and history. While Cabré gives us a “genuine” novel, this work, through a
series of calculated ambiguities, situates itself in the gray zone of “docuficción” or nonfictional novel (it is telling that the Spanish publishing
industry uses the single term “narrativa” for both). Javier Cercas is well
known as a novelist but not necessarily as a historian, and the publisher of
his text (Literatura Mondadori) is generally a venue for novels. Cercas’s
style in this text, however, is that of the omniscient historiographer.
In the text itself, very much as in Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla (1914),
Cercas addresses the question of genre in a “Prólogo: Epílogo de una
novela” (Anatomía 13–26) (Prologue: The Epilogue of a Novel) and an
“Epílogo: Prólogo de una novela” (415–437) (Epilogue: The Prologue of a
Novel). It is important to note that by “novela” (novel), Cercas does not
mean a genre but a specific historical narrative, indeed a possible type of
historical reality, and (at the same time) its native historiographic form. He
develops this notion of the “novela” in his fore- and afterwords, where he
seeks to eliminate the opposition between literature and history, novel and
historiography, by alternately adducing dialectical, ironic, and enthymematic
arguments. In a complex, sometimes sly and sometimes coquettish line of
reasoning, he unveils before the reader’s eyes a series of apparent
contradictions between the two genres (there are others he leaves veiled). He
performs a dizzying juggling act with the categories of fiction, novel, and
reality, in an effort to show that in the rare and special case of the putsch of
February 23, reality—in the perfect “symmetry” (Cercas) of all its
elements—is really like a “novela,” indeed is a “novela.”
Al fin y al cabo hay razones para entender el golpe del 23 de febrero
como el fruto de una neurosis colectiva. O de una paranoia colectiva. O,
más precisamente, de una novela colectiva. [ . . . ] ¿Cómo se me ocurrió
escribir una novela [ . . . ] sobre una novela colectiva? [ . . . ] De repente,
todo era coherente, simétrico, geométrico, igual que en las novelas
[ . . . ] Si una novela debe iluminar la realidad mediante la ficción,
imponiendo geometría y simetría allí donde sólo hay desorden y azar,
¿no debía partir de la realidad, y no de la ficción? ¿No era superfluo
añadir geometría a la geometría y simetría a la simetría? [ . . . ]
comprendí que los hechos del 23 de febrero poseían por sí mismos toda
la fuerza dramática y el potencial simbólico que exigimos de la
literatura. (Cercas Anatomía 15–24)
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(After all, there are reasons to interpret the 23 February coup as the fruit
of a collective neurosis. Or of collective paranoia. Or, more precisely, of
a collective novel. [ . . . ] How did I come up with the idea of writing a
novel about a collective novel? [ . . . ] Suddenly, everything was
coherent, symmetrical, geometric, just like in a novel [ . . . ] If a novel
should iluminate reality through fiction, imposing geometry and
symmetry where there is only disorder and chance, should it not start
from reality, and not from fiction? Was it not superfluos to add
geometry to geometry and symmetry to symmetry? [ . . . ] I understood
that the incidents of 23 February possessed of their own all the dramatic
force and the symbolic potential we expect from literature.) (Cercas
Anatomy 5–12)
Hence Anatomía de un instante is a form of historiography that is and
must be novelistic because the reality itself is novelistic. In the image of
Suárez defying the army’s machine guns—so Cercas claims—all of this is
condensed:
Aunque no sea un libro de historia [ . . . ] no renuncie del todo a ser
leído como un libro de historia [ . . . ] aunque no sea una novela, no
renuncie del todo a ser leído como una novela; [ . . . ] este libro no
renuncia del todo a entender por medio de la realidad aquello que
renunció a entender por medio de la ficción, y de ahí que no verse en el
fondo sobre el 23 de febrero, sino sólo sobre una imagen o un gesto de
Adolfo Suárez el 23 de febrero y, colateralmente. (Cercas Anatomía 25–
26)
(Although it’s not a history book [ . . . ] it will not entirely renounce
being read as a history book [ . . . ] although it’s not a novel, it won’t
entirely renounce being read as a novel [ . . . ] this book will not entirely
renounce unterstanding by means of reality that which it renounced
understanding by means of fiction and from there seeing itself deep
down as not being about 23 February but only about an image of or a
gesture from Adolfo Suárez on 23 February, and, collaterally.) (Cercas
Anatomy 15)
The image and the fact that this image exists are proof of the novelistic
reality of the historical event, which here, as it were, has produced its own
metaphor, its own symbol.
Como si misteriosamente, en este instante eterno no sólo Suárez sino
todo el país hubiera sabido para siempre quién era [ . . . ] el gesto de
Suárez [ . . . ] no contiene nada, pero a través del cual, como a través de
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29 ♦ IMAGES OF TIME
un vidrio sentimos que podríamos verlo todo—podríamos ver a Adolfo
Suárez, el 23 de febrero, la historia reciente de España, tal vez un rostro
que es acaso nuestro rostro verdadero. (Cercas Anatomía 430)
(As if mysteriously in this eternal moment not only Suárez but the
whole country had always known who it was [ . . . ] Suárez’s gesture
[ . . . ] is meaningless, but we feel we could see all through it, as if
through a window—we could see Adolfo Suárez on the 23rd of
February, the recent history of Spain, perhaps a face which is possibly
our true face.)
This syllogism that Cercas rehearses for us is of course an example of
circular reasoning. More interesting, however, is the question of its purpose,
its implications, the politics of its view of history. Both texts, Les veus del
Pamano and Anatomía de un instante, are undoubtedly what one might call
politically accurate. There are nevertheless political differences between
them, which reside in their implicit conceptions of memory or history. In
terms of the politics of memory, Cabré’s message is that history leaves its
traces behind even in the world of everyday life, where it continues to be
active as a real, effective presence, more in the sense of actualitas than of
realitas. Cabré’s novel is in this sense a melodramatic variant of the abovementioned “performative turn” in the discourse of memory. When past
events are recollected as they are by Tina, the past itself becomes an actor in
the present and hence an active part of its ontology. Because a narrative
imbrication between history and the present is lacking, this relationship, as
suggested above, is articulated according to the paradigm of the image, in
which the two temporal stages are presented as simultaneous. For Cercas,
the paradigm of the image is less aesthetic and strategic than historicophilosophical. It formalizes and guarantees the metaphor of history as the
“novela de España.” “Novela,” for him, does not mean a play with possible
worlds. It is a historico-philosophical metaphor for the belief in Spain’s
teleology, its entelechy. Here, what that means concretely is the democratic
transición (Transition), toward which the failed military putsch—for Cercas:
teleologically—converges. The temporality of history is abolished here. The
image of time that this metaphor encompasses is similarly one that is
ultimately non-narrative.
Conclusion
My main thesis is that in the contemporary Spanish historical novel of the
last ten years, the relationship of past and present is increasingly structured
by the paradigm of the image, which thus replaces narrativity and linearity
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and even brings them to the point of collapse. I took as my premise the
hypothesis that the notion of memory itself is caught up in a process of
change. The development of the novel of memory can be seen against the
backdrop of this change, which in turn is expressed in different forms of
temporality. Within these forms of temporality, that is, in different images of
time, the novel of memory shapes the relationship of past and present, which
is central to it. I began by sketching in broad outline the paradigm shift
undergone by the novel of memory over the last thirty years and listed the
contexts that define it: postmodernism, cosmopolitanization, and the
ontologizing of memory. Finally, I took an in-depth look at two very
different, indeed almost antithetical texts. In Les veus del Pamano, the
paradigm of the image operates on various levels: in the novel’s proximity to
a television series, in its gestural language, its visualizations, and finally as a
semantic structure combining past and present. In Anatomía de un instante,
the image is the symbolic concretization of a historico-philosophical
interpretation of contemporary Spanish history. Both novels de-narrativize
the relationship of past and present, one by dissolving the narrative bond
between them, the other through the simultaneous presence of past, present,
and future states within an image.
In the first years of democracy, the analogy between novel and memory
based on narrativity and linearity made the novel of memory the appointed
model for the “recuperación de la memoria histórica” (recuperation of
historical memory). With the paradigm of the image, this alliance begins to
crack; the notion of memory itself starts to lose its meaning. The paradigm
of the image is well equipped to compensate for the real dissolving of the
communicative relationship between primary and secondary witnessing in
literature by assimilating the two instances, between imagining and
remembering. We have seen from two models the directions in which the
novel then tends to evolve. In both cases, remembering is replaced by
image-like simultaneity. In Les veus del Pamano, the novel generates
picture-like scenarios; it converges, as it were, toward the genre of film.
Conversely, in Anatomía de un instante, a narrative that has congealed into
an image is re-narrativized, and the novel converges toward the genre of
history writing. Film and history writing are two reference points of the
novel that negate it and at the same time mark new poles: the vanishing
points or zero points of literary realism.
Notes
1.
On the shift of focus from the representation of memory to the representation of
time, see, for example, the works of Andreas Huyssen: “The most interesting aspect
of the debate [about history versus memory] is what it may portend for the
emergence of a new paradigm of thinking about time and space, history and
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31 ♦ IMAGES OF TIME
geography in the twenty-first century” (4). In Spain, this is the case especially, albeit
not exclusively, with periods of political change. To what extent the democratic
Transition involved suspending memory through “a collective installation in a
present that wished itself absolute” (93) is shown in an essay by Joan Ramon
Resina. See also Subirats on the evolution of temporal structures during this period.
Moreiras-Menor raises the question, “[cómo] el pasado se desmitifica como el
tiempo de la historia . . . para dar paso . . . a una historia del presente” (12) (how the
past is de-mythified as the time of history . . . to give way. . . to a history of the
present). Unlike Moreiras-Menor, however, I do not look for traces of an emphatic
deconstruction of temporal linearity. Rather, I find—specifically in the novel—
transformations, distortions, and reconfigurations of this temporal structure. These
relativize the narrative logic, but also have very different implications as far as the
politics of memory are concerned.
2. Two important precursors of the cosmopolitan interpretation of national history are
the novels Corazón tan blanco by Javier Marías and El jinete polaco (both from
1991) by Antonio Muñoz Molina. It is no accident that both were published on the
eve of the annus mirabilis in 1992, when Spain presented itself to the world as a
country that had finally arrived in the present. Both reflect the significance of
national history and identity in a transnational world.
3. This privileging of the legal can also be seen in the opposite case, where legal means
are used to prevent historical enlightenment, as shown by the legal proceedings
against the investigative judge Baltasar Garzón in January 2012.
4. See, for example, “visual history” (Paul) and the so-called “pictorial” or “iconic
turn” (Mitchell).
5. Interestingly, both semantic dimensions of “image”—the philosophical and the
narrative—received the formulations that make them capable of adoption by, or
compatible with, contemporary cultural theory at almost the same time—the end of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. As Safranski points out, the
attempt to discover “historical truth not in the temporal continuum but in fissures
and fractures” (200) in plurality and latency and other forms of nonsynchronism
(Bloch), goes back to a type of diagnosis of time that held sway in the final years of
the Weimar Republic. It had earlier received its initial formulations from Nietzsche,
Benjamin, and Heidegger, and as mentioned above was later continued by Derrida.
6. From the cover blurb of the German translation.
7. URL: www.tv3.cat/videos/1623399 (Part 1) and www.tv3.cat/videos/1623409 (Part
2). On the cinematic adaptation see Jiménez.
8. An overlapping of Oriol’s and Tina’s perceptual perspectives takes place only
briefly and metaphorically at the end of Part 1 (1:16:38–1:17:38) and again at the
beginning of Part 2 (0:03:37–0:04:13), when Tina stands in front of the school
building and photographs the road into the village, on which Oriol has been led
away shortly before. By reducing the present-day plot to a mere occasion for
recounting the historical one, the series effectively becomes a film adaptation of a
virtual classically historical novel.
9. Both face very similar family situations; Oriol’s ideological and moral
unfaithfulness “makes” Rosa “sick,” just as Tina is “made sick” by Jordi’s marital
unfaithfulness (Cabré 398, 401). Ultimately, Tina comes to see herself as the diary’s
intended recipient: “L’Oriol Fontelles parlava a la Tina Bros directament” (328)
(Oriol Fontelles was speaking directly to Tina Bros).
10. Note, for example, how here and there the text is sprinkled with technical medical
terms in parentheses, e.g., “Diafragmodínia o diafragmàlgia” (Cabré 98)
(diaphragmalgia). Here, the subject’s consciousness enters the narrator’s discourse.
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The subtext is the uncontrollable nature of Tina’s fear of contracting a terminal
illness. On the shift of subject between Oriol and the narrator: “Llavors, la Rosa va
tossir i ell [i.e., Oriol] es va aixecar, disposat a travessar la plaça i anar cap a ella.
Aleshores va veure que a l’home xop se n’hi havia ajuntat un altre, i que tots dos
miraven cap a ell i no sé què deien, i vaig [i.e., Oriol] comprendre que era millor no
embolicar-vos-hi, ni a tu ni a la teva mare, perquè eren gent sense entranyes” (Cabré
353) (Just then Rosa coughed, and he jumped up and wanted to run to her. Then he
saw that the man who was soaking wet had been joined by a second man. The two of
them looked over at him and said something, and I realized that it would be better
not to drag you into this story). In this sentence, Tina, the narrator, and the
stonemason Jaume Serrallac alternate: “Es van posar a riure ben fort [Tina and
Jaume Serrallac], jo [i.e., Tina] desmaiada de por per la brometa i l’amo Rendé, des
del taulell, va pensar [ . . . ]” (Cabré 620) (Both of them laughed out loud; I was half
dead with fear because of that joke, and behind the bar Rendé thought . . . ).
11. Note the shift of subject and time within a single paragraph as well as the shift of
focus: “La Tina va sentir badallar un altre cop el doctor Zhivago [ . . . ] i també
pensava en què deu estar fent ara mateix l’Arnau. Déu meu, que no estigui posant
els ulls en blanc i que no faci aquella veu impostada, litúrgica, falsa i ritual i que
continuï essent un bon noi, amén. Després de veure com desapareixia l’últim
alumne, la pissarra meticulosament esborrada, les cendres de l’estufa remogudes,
l’Oriol se n’anà al lavabo a rentar-se les mans del guix acumulat durant tot el dia”
(Cabré 245) (Tina heard Doctor Zhivago yawn again . . . And she also wondered
what Arnau was doing just then. My God, hopefully he’s not rolling his eyes and
talking in that artificial, unctuous voice, and hopefully he’s still a nice guy, amen.
Once the last pupil had left, once he had wiped the blackboard clean and emptied the
ashes out of the oven, Oriol walked to the bathroom).
Works Cited
Assmann, Aleida and Conrad, Sebastian. Memory in a Global Age: Discourses,
Practices, Trajectories. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
Austin, J.L. How to Do Things With Words. Ed. J.O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. L’échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Print.
Bloch, Ernst. Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics. Trans. Mark Ritter.
New German Critique 11 (1977): 22–38. Web. 14 Jan. 2013. Print.
Cabré, Jaume. Les veus del Pamano. 6th ed. Barcelona: Proa, 2005. Print.
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